New Geography

Category: Demographics

  • Young Voters Turn America Left

    Nothing made Barack Obama’s victory potentially more historically significant than his overwhelming support from millennial voters, members of the generation born in or after 1982. Obama won voters under 30 by roughly two-to-one, compared with barely half for John Kerry, making some Democrats positively giddy with the prospect of long-term domination of American politics. Most of these voters also stayed with the Democrats down ticket, enhancing the mass slaughter of GOP lambs across the country.

    Whether the Democrats keep this edge, however, depends not so much on the new president’s personal appeal, but on whether he and his party can deliver economically for workers entering a very tough economy. This will become increasingly critical as millennial voters age and begin focusing less on symbolism and more on how the new regime has worked for them in terms of income and upward mobility.

    The poor economy impacts young voters more than commonly believed. Even before the recession kicked in, a 2006 survey by the Center for American Progress found 15- to 25-year-olds twice as likely to view the economy as the main issue than the rest of population. When they came out to vote earlier this month, young voters had little reason to support continued Republican rule. Even in the expansionary period earlier in this decade, the incomes of younger workers continued to fall, in part because they were too young to enjoy gains from either the stock or housing bubbles.

    More ominously, since 2000, these reverses have been shared even by those with college educations–the very group that, outside of the poor and African-Americans, most supported Obama. They voted for him at a time when, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, half of all companies planned to cut the number of new graduates hired from the previous year.

    In contrast to previous generations, millennials are finding that a four-year degree no longer insulates them from declining earnings or the specter of under-employment. This may be in part because college-educated workers today face unprecedented competition from skilled labor in other countries, particularly in the developing world.

    Reversing this trend for younger workers may well prove the greatest challenge and opportunity for the new administration. If the millennials stick with President Obama and the Democrats, we indeed could witness a long-term shift toward the left in American politics.

    Certainly, the initial indications are positive. As Morley Winograd and Michael Hais point out in their groundbreaking book Millennial Makeover, younger voters were attracted to the egalitarian and “civic” orientation of the Obama campaign. They first rejected the individualist, combative baby-boomer ethos represented by Hillary Clinton, who did very poorly among younger voters. Later they also turned against the harsh tone of the McCain campaign and its embrace of both Cold War rhetoric and social conservatism.

    However, how long will the millennials’ leftward tilt last? It all depends on whether the new administration fixes the economy and creates opportunities for the millennials who will be flooding the workforce in the coming years.

    A generation’s early exposure to politics and politicians can shape their perspective for decades. The politics of the generation that came to age during the 1930s, for example, reflected their experience first with the New Deal and then with Democratic leadership during the Second World War.

    Although conservative ideologues can argue incessantly that Franklin Roosevelt’s policies prolonged the Great Depression, the fact remains that most Americans supported Roosevelt through the entire period. More importantly, after the great stimulus of the Second World War, large parts of an entire generation shared in one of the greatest periods of prosperity in global history.

    Not only did they enjoy a steady increase in real incomes, but also the average person’s access to homeownership and college education expanded at an unprecedented rate. In addition, critically, the economy’s expansion took place without increasing the gap between the rich and everyone else, unlike the most recent expansions.

    Economists can bicker all they want, but most people believed that the New Deal and the Democrats delivered. This won them the loyalty of a generation that kept them as the majority party well into the 1960s.

    If President Obama and the Democrats can deliver similarly prolonged economic growth with a strong egalitarian distribution, the millennials would seem destined to constitute the bulwark of a quasi-permanent new majority. Nothing that the Republicans could do with cultural issues or security could offset this phenomenon. Indeed, millennial positions on issues such as gay marriage and abortion suggest that contemplating a continuation of the “culture wars” could be self-defeating.

    This is not the only possible scenario. In the 1960s and 1970s, many baby boomers also embraced liberal politics, largely for cultural reasons and in opposition to the Vietnam War. However, the dismal economic failures of the Carter years, and the apparent cluelessness of the Democratic Congress in finding ways to compete in a changing world economy, ultimately drove many boomers to Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. This shift allowed the GOP to dominate American politics for a quarter century.

    For the new president, the critical millennial challenge will be to create a vibrant, productive economy that can expand opportunities for new workers, including those with college degrees. Style and symbolism will seduce young people only for so long; ultimately, they will also want jobs, income and the chance to live a decent middle-class life.

    Everything depends on what the Democrats now do. Few of the forces closest to the new president–the gentry liberals, the legal establishment, the green lobby and big city mayors–have a track record of creating widespread new employment and expanding opportunity.

    In addition, much of the leadership of the congressional party, based in urban and elite locales, favors positions that might constrain broad-based growth.

    A policy of raising taxes on entrepreneurs (as opposed to the accumulated wealth of the gentry class), increased regulation on small businesses and spending on an ever-expanding public sector bureaucracy does not bode well for a strong economic resurgence.

    It is true that younger voters, as a recent Center for American Progress report suggested, support higher taxes and expanded government as the preferred way to solve social ills. But as they age, some of those very millennials will be the ones paying the bills for their good intentions. They will have to try establishing businesses in a harsh regulatory climate. This could turn even some now fervent Obamaphiles into retro-Reaganites.

    However, if the new president proves as clever at policy as at politics, and sparks a new growth economy, all this could prove moot. With a grateful new generation behind him, Obama could help the Democrats achieve a period of predominance every bit as extended as the one shaped by Franklin Roosevelt three-quarters of a century ago.

    It all boils down to whether the senator can meet the millennial challenge not only this year but also in the years ahead.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • The Geography of Change: Election 2008

    As an old radical Democrat, I remained fearful that this fall would see another 2000 and 2004. But instead there was a massive shift of perhaps 10 million votes, or about 7 percent to the Democratic side.

    Yet in some ways the “red” and “blue” map of results doesn’t look very different than in the past – a vast interior sea of red, although close inspection reveals some important shifts from red to blue. But the second map, of change – 2008 compared to 2004, is astounding: now a sea of blue across the North and West (except for the Arizona due home state effect). There was also a fascinating (Bible?) belt of counties that became redder than in 2004, if that were possible, from Appalachia, the southwest tip of PA, through WV, TN and northern AL, then west across the border South through TN, AR, ands OK.

    The 2008 election clearly reinforced and amplified some trends already apparent in 2006, a Democratic ascendancy based first in large metropolitan areas, but now extending far into suburbia and even exurbia, and dominated by an intellectual and professional class, and second, traditional racial and ethnic minority areas, urban or rural.

    Now these are joined by a third group, a dramatically larger Obama vote from the under thirty, and probably enough to have shifted several critical states – CO, IN, IA, NH, NC and VA – the Democrats. The three groups overlap, of course. Except in those anomalous border states, the relative shift was about the same in rural small-town America as in the large metropolitan areas. However, the turnout certainly increased more for minorities and for the under-30 than for us white non-Hispanic adults. Frankly, along with other political geography experts, I underestimated the likelihood of the shift to the Democrats of VA, NC and IN.

    There are some fascinating details. First is the amazing success of Obama in counties dominated by colleges and universities, with switches in strongly Republican Whitman county in Washington (home of Washington State), or Gallatin, MT (Montana State, Bozeman) and Monongalia (Univ. West Virginia), or Tippecanoe (Purdue University), IN, and dozens of others. Second is the shift of many metropolitan core, suburban and exurban counties to Obama, including in California Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego (truly amazing), as well as Reno (Washoe), NV; Orlando (Orange), FL; Houston (Harris); TX; Birmingham, AL; and Raleigh, NC. Perhaps the most unusual were the switch of very long time Republican strongholds as Omaha NE, Cincinnati, OH, and Grand Rapids, MI. Third, Democrats also continued to carry even more counties with environmental in-migration, especially in the west.

    We may have seen a historic shift from the baby-boomer generation to a newer Millennial generation. But the Democrats should remember from 1994 that the American electorate is centrist, and any supposed realignment is fragile.

    Richard Morrill is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Washington. His research interests include: political geography (voting behavior, redistricting, local governance), population/demography/settlement/migration, urban geography and planning, urban transportation (i.e., old fashioned generalist)

    Election maps courtesy of Mark Newman, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan

  • The Future of Affirmative Action Under President Obama

    There is going to be a lot of debate on the impact of Barack Obama’s election on the future of affirmative action.

    There has been speculation for months among all sides of the debate about whether Obama’s ascension to the Presidency would provide proof positive that affirmative action is no longer necessary, or at least, has run its course.

    Ward Connerly, a black Republican who has led the fight to ban affirmative action in California and other states, told the San Francisco Chronicle today that Obama’s election decimates “victimhood“.

    Obama has said that his own daughters do not deserve affirmative action because of their economic privilege. As president, asks Joan Vennochi in the Boston Globe, will he lead the way from race-based to class-based policies? Some black leaders, she writes, citing such figures as Eugene Rivers and Kevin Peterson, say Obama’s political success necessitates a new approach to the issue.

    As Ben Smith writes on Politico.com, partisans of both sides of the bitter, long-running wars over affirmative action say Obama’s position on the subject is ambiguous and scarcely articulated. As a state senator in Illinois, he called traditional affirmative action “absolutely necessary,” but he’s more recently called for government to “craft” policy “in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more.”

    Some of the staunchest opponents of race-based affirmative action are skeptical of replacing it with a system that takes class into account rather than simply considering merit, but if Obama or the courts were to shift away from existing programs, writes Smith, a focus on class seems the most likely direction.

    Indeed, affirmative action cannot endure if nothing else because the black/white paradigm no longer fits. Ironically the rise of Hispanic Americans (who, by the way, voted for Obama by a nearly 2-to-1 margin) may prove the critical factor here.

    As I have maintained for years, the future of multiculturalism is not fragmentation and segmentation into endless subgroups, but a blurring, mixing and blending of races, ethnicities and cultures. This process is already well under way.

    In Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America (2008), author Gregory Rodriguez writes that America has become so mixed that racial distinctions are losing their power to categorize and separate Americans from each other:

    Mexican Americans are forcing the United States to reinterpret the concept of the melting pot to include racial as well as ethnic mixing. Rather than abetting the segregationist ethos of a country divided into mutually exclusive groups, Mexican Americans continue to blur the lines between “us” and “them.” Just as the emergence of the mestizos undermined the Spanish racial system in colonial Mexico, Mexican Americans, who have always confounded the Anglo-American racial system, will ultimately destroy it, too.

    How will they destroy it? By making categorization impossible, and hence, meaningless. When racial classification is no longer sensible or even possible, neither are discrimination or affirmative action. And we have long since passed that point. I often use Tiger Woods as an illustration of this: he is a mixture of black, Asian, Caucasian, and Indian (oops, I mean Native American) ancestors, but when asked to identify himself he says, ”I’m Tiger.”

    Another key factor will be interracial dating and marriage. In 1987 slightly less than half of Americans approved of dating between black and whites. By 2007, according to the Pew Center, this had risen to 83%. These changes are most evident among the millennial generation, the very people who will make up the majority of adults in 2050, 94% of whom approve of such matches.

    Already, over 2.5 percent of Americans are of mixed race, and this percentage grows significantly among people under 18, and, geographically, in California, on the entire west coast, and in the New York area. One third of all mixed marriages involve Hispanics. In California, between 1980 and 1997 one of every seven babies born had parents of different races. This notion of race will become ever more fluid as it becomes obvious from DNA testing that people’s racial or ethnic origins are often far more diverse than usually imagined.

    During the 1990s, even interracial marriages between black and whites, once very rare, increased seven times as rapidly as marriages overall. Intermarriages between native-born Hispanics and Asians with other groups covered upwards of thirty percent in the first native-born generation, and over 57 percent in the next.

    These developments are anathema to the diversity/affirmative action industries. Believe me; I have been encountering them on the corporate speaking circuit for years. When I speak (optimistically!) of the American future, of the blending and blurring of races, ethnicities and cultures, and of the individual as the basic sovereign unit of a truly free and diverse society, they start going through the first four phases of grief: denial, anger, bargaining and depression. Regrettably, the final phase – acceptance – is beyond them. They will probably endure, administering preferential treatment for quite a while, as they have been empowered and financed by large, slow-changing bureaucracies: governments, foundations and corporations.

    But the writing is on the wall. A mixed-race candidate has just been elected President of the United States. In the same election, via voter initiative, Nebraska adopted (and Colorado narrowly rejected) state constitution amendments outlawing discrimination by race, sex, ethnicity or national origin. Nebraska has thereby joined California, Washington and Michigan as states where voters have outlawed discrimination by race. According to the American Civil Rights Institute, similar amendments, put on state ballots by voters, will appear in coming election cycles across the country, including in Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri and Colorado (again).

    What? you thought such discrimination was already illegal and unconstitutional? It is. These state ballot initiatives have become necessary to overturn the system of ethnic favoritism known as affirmative action – the use of racial and ethnic quotas in the bestowal of public and private largesse – which has been codified in both public policy and private practice.

    Obviously, the American people are tiring of a diversity regime that (perversely) demands conformity of thought (also known as ”political correctness,” the phrase Soviet commissars used to enforce Central Party rule). Eventually, the American people themselves, having become a mongrel nation, will also reject racial and ethnic categorization. Hint: watch the dramatic rise in the number of people who decline to state in surveys, questionnaires and the Census itself.

    Dr. Roger Selbert is a business futurist and trend guy. He publishes Growth Strategies, a newsletter on economic, social and demographic trends, and is a professional public speaker www.rogerselbert.com. Roger is US economic analyst for the Institute for Business Cycle Analysis in Copenhagen, and North American representative for its US Consumer Demand Index.

  • The Triumph Of The Creative Class

    Barack Obama rode to his resounding victory on the enthusiasm of two constituencies, the young and African Americans, whose support has driven his candidacy since the spring. Yet arguably the biggest winners of the Nov. 4 vote are located at the highest levels of the nation’s ascendant post-industrial business community.

    Obama’s triumph reflects a decisive shift in the economic center of gravity away from military contractors, manufacturers, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, suburban real estate developers, energy companies, old-line remnants on Wall Street and other traditional backers of the GOP. In their place, we can see the rise of a different set of players, predominately drawn from the so-called “creative class” of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the younger, go-go set in the financial world.

    These latter business interests provided much of the consistent and massive financial advantage that the Illinois senator has accrued since early spring. The term “creative class” was popularized by former George Mason professor Richard Florida, who used it to describe those with both brainy business acumen and a very liberal cultural agenda borrowed from the bohemians of the ’60s.

    Florida, whose views have affected urban policymakers over the last several years, has attributed these characteristics to upward of 30% of the workforce, basing his figures largely on education. On close examination, suggests Brookings Institution demographer Bill Frey, the “cultural creatives” at the core of Florida’s formulation represent likely no more than 5% of the population. After all, most college-educated workers live in suburbs, have children and even attend conservative churches.

    In contrast, the narrower “creative” group clusters heavily in the very areas–college towns, urban centers, some elite suburbs–where Obama has done exceedingly well from early on in the campaign. Nearly one quarter of the core “creative group,” those working in the arts and culture industries, live in just two cities, New York and Los Angeles.

    Many of these workers are employed by a far smaller, and more influential, base of largely pro-Obama corporate and financial titans who embrace the Florida view that “creativity” can save the U.S. economy. These include the likes of Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google–whose employees contributed over $400,000 to Obama’s campaign–as well as a who’s who of other Silicon Valley oligarchs.

    Obama has also enjoyed almost lock-step support in Hollywood and among the go-go wing on Wall Street. Hedge-fund managers, for example, gave 77% of their contributions in congressional races to Democrats last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan analyst of campaign finances. George Soros, the peculiarly left-leaning financial speculator, has been a long-time financial supporter and a critical ally in terms of funding pro-Obama media.

    Of course, many of these people had influence during the Clinton administration, but not remotely to the extent we are about to witness. Back in the 1990s, traditional business leaders, some of whom had backed the “big dog” back in Arkansas, still had some White House clout. After 1994, they were thick with the Republican-dominated Congress.

    Today the traditional business leadership, like their Republican allies, present a spectacle of utter disarray. The commercial banks have been effectively nationalized. Many traditional manufacturers, notably automakers, also yearn to suck on the federal teat. Reduced to supplicants, these companies have surrendered their standing as independent players. At the same time, the traditional energy companies, long the whipping boys of Congressional Democrats, will be fully occupied trying to survive the onslaught of anti-carbon regulations now all but inevitable.

    In contrast, the creative class comes to power with the wind at its back. Its ascendancy was first predicted by Daniel Bell in his 1973 classic The Coming of Post-Industrial Society as a natural product of the rise of science-based industry. Shortly afterward California’s Jerry Brown became the first politician to recognize this shift, embracing Silicon Valley and Hollywood as a counterweight to the industrial, aerospace and agribusiness establishment that had supported both his father, former governor Pat Brown, and Ronald Reagan.

    In the ensuing decades, the creative class establishment rallied to different political causes and candidates, including Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign and the causes of other so-called “Atari Democrats.” Yet it is only this year that its members have, like the Skynet computer system in the Terminator series, reached a level of consciousness about their potential true power.

    What will this ascendancy mean in economic terms? Since the creative class deals largely with images, ideas and transactions, it’s not likely to focus much on reviving the tangible parts of the economy: manufacturing, logistics, traditional energy and agribusiness.

    On the other hand, the creatives are unlikely to be protectionist since they represent companies whose growth markets, and often suppliers, are located overseas. Heavily counted among the world’s richest people, they are also likely to support some Bushite policies–like low interest rates and financial bailouts–that prop up their stock prices and drive money to Wall Street.

    The biggest difference between the creative class and the old business types isn’t on cultural issues–few traditional CEOs embraced the religious right’s agenda–but on environmental policy. Executives at places like Apple, as well as opportunistic investment firms, have become enthusiastic jihadis in the war against climate change. Conveniently, their companies don’t tend to be huge energy consumers and, if they make products, do so in largely unregulated facilities in China or elsewhere in the developing world. And youthful financial firms looking for the next “bubble” could benefit hugely from mandates for more solar, wind and other alternative fuels.

    All this could prove very bad news for groups that produce tangible products in the U.S. or that, like large agribusiness firms, are big consumers of carbon. Also threatened will be anyone who builds the suburban communities–notably single-family houses and malls–that most Americans still prefer but that Gore and his acolytes dismiss as too energy-intensive, not to mention in bad taste.

    Theoretically, there is opportunity for the Republicans–if they can somehow jettison the more primitive parts of their social agenda and come up with their own bold, environmentally sound energy agenda. The new hegemons could easily be painted as moralistic hypocrites who live the carbon-heavy luxury lifestyle of the super-rich while demanding ordinary Americans give up their cars, homes and even their jobs.

    Yet given the creative class’ increasing domination of the media, and the inability of the GOP to comprehend the changing world around it, such a counterstroke may be years in coming. For the time being we will just have to watch to see if the new economic order can perform better than the now largely discredited old business establishment whose time in the sun, at least for now, has set.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • America in the Millennial Era

    By Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais

    Senator Barack Obama’s success in the 2008 presidential campaign marks more than an historical turning point in American politics. It also signals the beginning of a new era for American society, one dominated by the attitudes and behaviors of the largest generation in American history.

    Millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, now comprise almost one-third of the U.S. population and without their overwhelming support for his candidacy, Barack Obama would not have been able to win his party’s nomination, let alone been elected President of the United States. This new, “civic” generation is dramatically different than the boomers who have dominated our society since the 1960s and understanding this shift is critical to comprehending the changes that America will experience over the next forty years.

    The arrival of social network technologies enabled Millennials to create the most intense, group-oriented decision-making process of any generation in American history. This generation’s preference for consensus for everything from minor decisions, like where to hang out, and major decisions, such as whether go to war, stems from a belief that every one impacted by a decision needs, at very least, to be consulted about it. This approach will dominate how leaders of America’s primary institutions – from corporations and churches to government at all levels – will be measured in the years ahead.

    Contrast that approach to those of the candidates who struggled in 2008. In her losing run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton presented case for a highly assertive, controversial – if sometimes a bit too strenuous – Boomer style of leadership. She emphasized the value of her years of experience and wisdom. Senator John McCain tried that approach as well during the summer lull, but found it didn’t have sufficient power to overtake Obama in the national polls. He then rolled the dice and asked a Generation-X Governor, Sarah Palin, to help him win voters by emphasizing their mutual belief in the superiority of traditional social values and small government. The Republican ticket has had about as much success with this strategy as Governors Huckabee and Romney did Millennial voters during the primaries.

    To successfully manage the transition to a Millennial era, institutions will need to find leaders of any age far-sighted enough to fully embrace Millennial attitudes and behaviors. They have to give them full reign to makeover the outdated structures they will inherit.

    Millennials, in particular, are ready to take on the challenge. Millennials were taught that if you follow the rules and work hard, you will succeed. As the first generation to experience “always on,” high-speed access to the Internet at a young age, Millennials have confounded the vision of many Gen X futurists who envisioned the Net as a tool to enhance individual freedom and liberty, not as a new resource for community building. Sharing their ideas and thoughts constantly from short Twitter texts, or “Tweets,” to extended, if often amateurish, videos on YouTube, Millennials generate and absorb an overwhelming amount of information. Individual Millennials use this ability to influence their own decisions, and then those of the wider group. If institutions and their leaders want their decisions to have any credibility with this new generation, every institution will need to open its own governance procedures to ensure a level of transparency and fairness that meets the test of Millennial values.

    There have been other times in American history when a “civic” generation like the Millennials has emerged to transform the nation. In the eighteenth century a “civic” generation, called the “Republican Generation” by the seminal generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe, created the constitutional republic whose democratic values we celebrate to this day. About eighty years later, an equally “civic” impulse propelled to the war to abolish slavery and extend liberty and freedom to all citizens. And when the last “civic” generation was called upon by its elders to conquer fascism and remake America’s economy in the twentieth century, the GI Generation responded with such fervor and ability that they were labeled the “Greatest Generation” by a grateful nation.

    Now, another eighty years later, it is the Millennial Generation’s turn. Its “civic” revolution draws its unique character from the particular way Millennials were brought up, and their use of interactive communication technologies. We believe the Millennial Generation’s revolution will be just as profound as that of previous “civic” generations. Barack Obama’s victory does indeed mark the end of the late 20th century “idealist” era of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But its significance is much deeper, and likely to shape the nature of the new era the country is about to enter.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics Winograd and Hais are fellows at NDN and the New Policy Institute.

  • Spanish, Obama, and Cambio in St. Louis

    There are two definitive differences between St. Louis and Los Angeles: Autumn is better in St. Louis, and more people speak Spanish in Los Angeles. And, yeah, there’s the Mississippi River and the humidity and the beach and the film industry and the palm trees, but in terms of my own private geography and topophilia, autumn and Spanish are the differences that matter. I long for LA in every season but fall, and a part of my longing is, inevitably, a longing for Spanish.

    Let me be clear: my Spanish is not as good as it once was, as it should be, or as I would like it to be. At my best, I could read a newspaper, and now I struggle with verb conjugation as I try to teach my son a limited number of phrases. I had to correct my pronunciation of Sepulveda when I arrived in LA, and I had to constantly remind myself that Californians do not place the accent in Cordova on the first syllable as they do in my hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico. But during my time in California, the straining to understand when I rudely eavesdropped, the sorting of accents (Guatemalan, Mexican, Honduran), the delight in piecing together the history behind the names of the streets and the neighborhoods and the mountains – from Pico to Los Feliz to the San Gabriels – wrapped me in Spanish, and somehow made me feel comfortable with the constant struggle to comprehend a landscape written in a different language.

    I knew I moved through the city with a cloak of privilege. White Angelinos stereotypically treat Latinos, especially recent immigrants, as invisible workers. I tried to buck the stereotype, but my stumbling Spanish was usually no more than comic relief to native speakers. No one ever questioned (as they have some of my Latino friends) whether English was my first language. And when I was tired or distracted or just disinclined, I never had to speak Spanish to navigate the metro or read the paper or, even, to order at a restaurant. I’m willing to entertain the thought that my relationship to Spanish was no more than a condescending quest for local color, but I like to think it was more than that. I like to think that the city loved me in Spanish.

    It was in a spirit of perversity that, just as the leaves began to turn, the mosquitoes began to die, and the outdoors became bearable, I decided to accompany my husband to Cherokee Street in St. Louis for Mexican food. Cherokee Street has a burgeoning Latino community, boosting St. Louis’s Hispanic population to a whopping 2%. Nonetheless, undocumented residents perhaps double that number, and co-workers tell me they’ve watched St. Louis’s Latino population grow, especially within the Catholic community. For what it’s worth, I can’t stand on more than one street corner at a time, and from the corner of Cherokee and California it could almost have been LA. It was a hot, dry day. Dust actually blew past the furniture rental stores. Squint, and I could almost smell the Santa Anas. Our restaurant had a Spanish soap opera on the television, the waitress served the coke in a tall glass bottle. For a few minutes, it felt like the city loved me.

    Head west on Cherokee, and you will see a huge Obama poster with the word, Cambio – Change – written across the bottom, and an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the corner. In these final days of the campaign, images of Obama seem more and more to reflect what their creators want to see. The poster is, arguably, a picture of St. Louis’s potential future: a majority black city with a growing Latino, especially Mexican, population. I look at the poster, up against St. Louis’s characteristic red brick, and hope that Latinos here will be visible in a new way. I remember a bumper sticker, “Rednecks for Obama,” that I saw recently in my neighborhood. I remember that St. Louis is no blank slate when it comes to race relations. I chastise myself for being naive. I note that the poster says cambio, not esperanza; change, not hope. I think about how to tell my son, in Spanish, where I’ve been that day.

    Flannery Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at St. Louis University. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, she writes about the American West, the environment, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.

  • Election 2008: Hardcore Republican and Democratic versus Balanced Areas

    It’s interesting to look at 2000 presidential election results from some extreme counties, contrasting the most Republican and the Democratic areas, and compare them to some areas that voted 50:50 in 2004. I’ll look at 7 counties of each kind, illustrating the peculiar geography of American partisanship. The Republican and the Democratic areas will not change much, but it will be fascinating to see what happens to the even split areas of 2004. Do look them up in your road atlas and on the web for more detail!

    Ultra Republican counties
    The most extreme are all in the Great Plains or the Mountain West – not in the east. All are almost entirely white, most have more men than women (unusual in the US), have very high levels of traditional families, and most have fairly low levels of income inequality, reflective of cultural homogeneity.

    These can be grouped into three sets:

    1. Madison and Franklin, ID, and Rich, UT, (all close together);
    2. Grant, NE, and Garfield, MT; and
    3. Ochiltree, TX, and Beaver, OK, (also close to each other).

    The Idaho and Utah counties are similar in many ways, but the key characteristic is the dominance of the Mormon Church – no cultural ambiguity here! Rexburg, in Madison County, has a branch of Brigham Young University. Garfield and Grant typify the extremely low density and declining farm counties of the Plains and interior West, with a fiercely independent “western” image. Ochiltree and Beaver are in the Panhandle and also low density oil and gas and range economies. These are the rural, culturally conservative small towns that Sarah Palin would consider “real” America. Conspicuously absent are any counties that we would associate with the traditional image of rich suburbia and exurbia!

    Ultra Democratic Counties
    The extreme Democratic counties are not quite so extreme as their Republican counterparts. These counties are comprised of two somewhat distinct types – the cores of giant metropolitan areas, exemplified here by New York City, San Francisco and Washington, DC, and then the areas of very high concentrations of minorities.

    Claiborne, MS, (in the Mississippi delta) and Macon, AL (home of the Tuskegee institute), are highly Black. Menominee, WI, has a high concentration of Native American Indians, while Prince George’s County, MD, is both a large metropolitan suburban county (of Washington DC) and is majority Black. In contrast to the ultra Republican counties, these are all rather low in non-Hispanic whites, low in traditional families, but high in singles and partners. Most have high inequality, with societies bifurcated between the rich and the poor.

    The 50:50 balanced set is more complex and diverse. Some are in the South, with their fairly high minority shares balancing their likely cultural conservatism – Tensas, LA, (Mississippi delta), and Bladen, NC, (SE, food processing industry).

    Three are small city or small metropolitan Midwestern counties with diverse economies – rich agriculture, urban industry: Peoria, IL, Winneshiek, IA, and Nicollet, WI.

    Similarly, Monroe, PA, (Pocono mountains, tourism and exurban living), and Rensselaer, NY (Troy, Rust Belt, but some recovery) have both traditional conservative rural-oriented residents and liberal who have moved in from the New York Megalopolis. They tend to be intermediate between the very Republican and very Democratic areas in household structure, degree of inequality, with perhaps a little higher portion of the population engaged in manufacturing.

    These sample areas reinforce the conventional wisdom of a polarization, at the extremes, between a metropolitan Democratic base, high in minorities, and a rural-small-town Republican base of traditional “values”. The small city, small metropolitan belt, mainly across the North, is amazingly balanced, and not surprisingly, the major battleground in this election. Big cities may talk a lot about diversity, but it’s largely in these smaller towns, as well as some exurbs and suburbs, where the real political debate about our future now takes place.

    Richard Morrill is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Washington. His research interests include: political geography (voting behavior, redistricting, local governance), population/demography/settlement/migration, urban geography and planning, urban transportation (i.e., old fashioned generalist)

  • Industry, inequality and the middle classes

    The financial collapse dominates the news, but its unregulated rise is not unrelated to the relative decline of manufacturing over the last quarter century, and the outsourcing of much of industrial production. One consequence of this de-industrialization and financialization of everything has been an astounding increase in inequality, a massive concentration of wealth at the very top and the squeezing of the middle classes.

    Places that remained strong in manufacturing tend to have had and still have lower inequality than places more dependent on services, lowly to professional, and experienced a smaller change in inequality. This case has been argued by many, perhaps most eloquently by Zimmermann and Beal (2002) in Manufacturing Works, and by Scott (2003) The High Price of Free Trade.

    Zimmermann argues the importance of industrial production for national and local prosperity. In Part 2, “Changing geography and what it means”, he treats the relocation of industry, and then follows with “Counties gaining momentum:, Counties losing momentum, and Big City Blues (Philadelphia and beyond)”. He notes the huge northeastern losses in industry coincided with increased inequality, e.g., New York, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Rochester and in large numbers of smaller metropolitan counties. In contrast decreased inequality in many places in the South, Mountain states and plains (e,g, ND, SD, WY, UT, NE) with rapid industrial growth.

    Local economies dominated by manufacturing generally have had less inequality than ones dominated by services. Although this is particularly true in mostly northern states with a long history of labor unrest and successful unionization, even the more recent largely nonunionized industrialization in the South has reduced income inequality, although statewide levels remain a high, a hangover from their long pre-industrial and even feudal histories.

    What distinguishes lower levels of inequality? In my work using Census data these areas generally experience female labor force participation, higher shares of manufacturing and a larger population with only a high school education (i.e., not overloaded with us professionals!), but lower shares of government and of services. Manufacturing is just one of many factors, but it is a powerful one.

    It is instructive to look at some example areas of higher and of lower inequality in 2000 relative to the composition of their labor forces. The most unequal large areas/counties are New York (Manhattan) and Washington DC – by far, both with high levels of professional services and government, and low levels of industry. Also very unequal are many retirement and environmental service areas, with almost no manufacturing, such as St. Petersburg, Naples, Vero Beach and many other growing Florida cities, Jackson, Wyoming, and several ski dominated areas in Colorado and Utah.

    In stark contrast, inequality is quite low in such strong manufacturing communities as Kansas City, Worcester, Appleton-Green Bay, Fond du Lac (and several other Wisconsin cities), Duluth, Grand Rapids, Davenport-Rock Island, Manchester, NH, Lancaster, PA and Tacoma, WA.

    In sum, economic characteristic variation is real: egalitarian regions exhibit higher labor force participation, especially of women, and high levels of manufacturing – this is probably the most meaningful economic variable to account for lower inequality – and conversely higher inequality is associated with service and government job dependency. High shares of both managerial-professional occupations and service jobs, with lower shares of craft and manufacturing jobs are typically characteristic of elite metropolitan areas and helps account for their higher inequality.

    Change in inequality 1970-2000
    Since the 1970s most major metropolitan areas became less industrial and far more dominated by professional, finance, and other services, and by trade, and concomitantly, have become far more unequal. Prominent examples are Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit Minneapolis, Dallas, Houston, St. Louis, Atlanta, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Birmingham, Baltimore and Boston – a roster of historic giants of industry.

    There are probably only limited opportunities for these areas – particularly in California and the Northeast – to reindustrialize. Yet there may be more opportunities in dozens of smaller metropolitan areas, in all parts of the country, but especially in the historic Midwestern and Northeastern “urban-industrial” heartland, that have suffered varying degrees of deindustrialization. These places enjoy low costs and often retain concentrations of skilled labor. Places like Florence and Gadsden, AL; Pueblo CO; Peoria and Rock Island, IL; Evansville and Muncie, IN; Dubuque, IA; Shreveport, LA; Saginaw, Midland, Benton Harbor, Flint and Muskegon, MI; Binghamton, NY; Toledo, Akron, Dayton, and Canton OH; Tulsa, OK; and Charleston and Wheeling, WV all could benefit from a new emphasis on productive enterprise. But the question remains: does Congress or the next President possess the will to make this happen?

    Richard Morrill is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Washington. His research interests include: political geography (voting behavior, redistricting, local governance), population/demography/settlement/migration, urban geography and planning, urban transportation (i.e., old fashioned generalist)

  • Knowledge Worker Migration: Going Where the Brains Are

    At a time when national unemployment is rising, Nebraska is working overtime to attract labor. At the inaugural Sarpy County Economic Summit, Governor David Heinemann (R) talked about the need to “market the state to 16- to 20-year-olds.” Nebraska, apparently, has more jobs requiring college degrees than it has college graduates. (Interested college students can call the Director of the Nebraska Department of Economic Development, Richard Baier, at 402-471-3746.)
    Special incentives are in place for any employer who will bring in jobs that will drive up the average local salary. The idea is to keep young college graduates here by bringing in better jobs.

    Nebraska is not alone in this regard. In the middle of all the economic turmoil, the Federal Reserve districts in Cleveland, Chicago and Kansas City reported high demand and resulting upward pressure on wages for skilled labor. The industries most in need of additional skilled workers are energy, health care, and manufacturing. Yes, manufacturing. Skilled financial services workers were easier to come by in Dallas as a result of mergers in the industry. The same was true for financial workers in Chicago. The only minimum-wage jobs going wanting are in the leisure and hospitality industry in the Kansas City district.

    I did an analysis comparing States (plus Puerto Rico and D.C.) by the high percentage of workers with graduate degrees in 2007 and the change in that figure from 2005. For example, Nevada ranked 45th among the States for workforce with graduate degrees in 2007; yet they ranked number 1 for increasing that percentage since 2005 (from 6.6% to 7.5%). The Knowledge Score is simply the difference in the two ranks. Nevada has the highest score at 44. The States with the lower scores are falling behind: although they rank high this year other states are moving up faster in gaining educated knowledge workers. Delaware has a score of -37: they rank 15th for an educated workforce but next to last (better only than New Mexico) for going from 11.1% of the workforce with graduate degrees in 2005 to 10.4% in 2007.

    The Minneapolis district “reported continued strength in professional business services.” Our analysis scores them 2, meaning they are currently attracting a more educated workforce. In contrast, San Francisco and Philadelphia reported that “demand for professional business services was down.” I score California at -30 and Philadelphia at -14, meaning that they are losing their educated workforce. It’s likely that knowledge workers are leaving because of the lack of opportunity and, in California especially, high housing costs.

    Although Illinois ranked 12th among the states for percentage of the workforce with graduate degrees, their increase from two years ago was about the national average, giving them a Knowledge Score of -21. The demand for skilled labor in manufacturing, healthcare, and some professional services remained strong in the Chicago Federal Reserve district, which will put upward pressure on wages. These higher wages will serve to attract more knowledge workers to the State. The Chicago district, which includes northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, southern Minnesota, Michigan, and northern Indiana, reported shortages of skilled workers. Among the States included in the Chicago district, only Wisconsin and Indiana have positive Knowledge Scores.

    The relationship between education and income is well-known. The median-income in the U.S. was $33,452 for 2007, about what is earned by the worker with some college or an associate’s degree. Workers with only a high school diploma make about 20% less than that. A bachelor’s degree translates into a 40% increase in income; a worker with a graduate degree earns 83% more than the median-income. And this curve gets steeper every year: from 2006 to 2007 the slope increased 3%.

    So where are the knowledge workers going to and coming from? Nevada, Hawaii and DC lead the way in attracting them while New Mexico, Delaware and Louisiana are the biggest losers. Actually, only 10 States are losing knowledge workers as a percent of the workforce, including North Dakota, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Alaska, Arizona, California and Mississippi. In addition to educating the workforce, the U.S. also benefits from international migration. In the face of some of these shortages for skilled-labor, US immigration routinely increases the allowance for workers in industries like technology and others requiring advanced education. However, there has been little change in the overall percentage of the US workforce with advanced degrees: 10% in 2005, 9.9% in 2006 and 10.1% in 2007. Among the many other states increasing the share of their workforce with advanced degrees, Montana, North Carolina, Maine, Vermont and Maryland led the way with increase of more than 0.5%.

    You are probably surprised to find Nevada at the top of the Knowledge Scores. From September 2007 to September 2008, Nevada decreased the overall number of jobs by 7,600. In fact, the loss of 14,300 construction jobs was offset by a gain of 7,600 jobs in health services, transportation, utilities, education, and other services. The shift is toward jobs requiring skilled workers, those with higher levels of education, the Knowledge Workers.

    Down the road, it appears that the balance of knowledge workers are shifting to states that, for years, lagged behind perennial leaders like Massachussetts, California and New York. Now the balance is shifting and as the economy moves from speculation to productive jobs – such as those related to manufacturing, logistics, food and energy – we will also see an increase in new opportunities in these states for knowledge workers who are increasingly critical to these fields as well.

    Susanne Trimbath, Ph.D. is CEO and Chief Economist of STP Advisory Services. Dr. Trimbath’s credits include appearances on national television and radio programs. Dr. Trimbath is a Technical Advisor to the California Economic Strategy Panel and Associate Professor of Finance and Business Economics at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Dr. Trimbath was formerly Senior Research Economist at the Milken Institute and Senior Advisor on the Russian capital markets project for KPMG.

  • Obama’s Marketing Message

    By Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais

    In less than two weeks, when Barack Obama’s lead in all the polls is likely to be confirmed in the voting booth by the American electorate, millions of words will be written about why he won and how John McCain managed to lose. Unfortunately, marketing executives and corporate leaders have ignored some of the most important lessons from the campaign.

    Obama’s success to date lies in his ability to blend his own persona as a messenger with a unifying and uplifting message that reaches the newest generation of Americans, Millennials, born between 1982 and 2003. His campaign has mastered marketing through social networks and other Internet-based communication technologies. This “cool” approach defeated the “hot” rhetoric that came from his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, and is likely to perform even more favorably against the more confrontational and traditional campaign of John McCain.

    But Millennials don’t just represent the key constituency behind Senator Obama’s successful campaign but also a key market opportunity for economic growth. Almost one-third of all Americans are in this generational cohort, and even though many of them are still too young to vote, almost all of them influence the daily purchases of the families of which they are a part. Until brand managers and marketing mavens master the art of reaching and attracting Millennials, consumer expenditures will continue to languish.

    CEOs need to learn how to create brands that attract Millennials with something more transcendent than their product’s functionality or characteristics. Corporations will only hit their growth targets if they are willing to change their own message, messenger and media to fit the tastes of this generation.

    A recent study by The Economist magazine’s Intelligence Unit suggests this campaign lesson has not yet penetrated the thinking of many in the “C suites” of the world’s corporations. More than half of those executives said they did not currently have a strategy to target or retain this demographic group. In their report, “Maturing with the Millenials”, survey respondents acknowledged the need for new tactics to target the millennial customer, but indicated a lack of readiness to do so.

    For instance, the report found that, “While 44% indicate that communicating the right messages in the right medium and at the right time is critical to their success, the majority have yet to leverage enriched content, peer recommendations and enhanced online experiences as part of their outreach—even though they acknowledge these are among the most effective ways to communicate with Millennials.” This sounds a lot like Hillary Clinton’s advisors Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald on the eve of the Iowa caucuses when they derided the supporters of Obama as looking “like Facebook” pages. When Obama’s Facebook legions came out to vote in droves in the Iowa caucuses they dealt a fatal blow to Senator Clinton’s cause.

    Companies, fortunately, do not have to suffer the short shelf life of failed candidates. They can change their strategies in order to capture an emerging new base. We have seen this with companies that have succeeded with emerging ethnic markets at home and with whole new markets abroad.

    Even though most executives surveyed by The Economist understood that Millennials have specific consumer needs, few have tailored their marketing strategy for this generation. Four out of 10 executives in the Economist’s survey said that Web 2.0 technologies, such as webcasts and online forums, are the best way to serve Millennial customers. More than 80 percent agreed that consumer needs vary by age group, and 42 percent believed that a bigger share of investment should go towards Millennial customers. Yet remarkably, the respondents reported that telephone, e-mail and physical storefronts were the top three ways that Millennials could interact with their company currently.

    The risks companies are taking by not addressing Millennials are great. John Gerzema, Chief Insights Officer for Young & Rubicam, details this argument in a new book, The Brand Bubble. His research shows that consumers’ trust in brands has declined by half in just ten years. Instead consumers increasingly turn to nontraditional sources of information, such as search engines and social networks, to determine what they should buy and from whom. That is why any good corporate CEO should check every day what customers are saying about their company on the mushrooming “Why I hate xx” websites that now exist for every major company.

    To restore their brand’s value and regain traction with the buying public, companies will need to reinvent themselves in order to engage Millennial constituencies on Millennial terms and in Millennial media. They will need to learn the art of attracting support from Millennials without appearing to be chasing after it in much the same way Obama did in his campaign.

    One leading-edge private sector example of how to pull off this Zen-like non-effort is Nike’s successful efforts to enhance its brand’s attractiveness by creating online communities of runners. By partnering with Apple it created an application for runners that transfers running time, distance and even calories burned to a Nano so that the results can be uploaded for sharing with others. By building virtual running communities, Nike gave its customers an opportunity to register their individual profiles while receiving content that they can access while running. Nike was able to create its own social network linking people with similar running habits, such as those who run with poodles, to produce a strong bond of affiliation among each member of the group, and from that experience an equally strong sense of loyalty to the Nike brand.

    In 2006, the International Television and Video Almanac pointed out that Americans were being bombarded with about “5,000 marketing messages each day, up from 3000 in 1990 and 1500 in 1960.” Nothing in the trend line for communication technologies suggests this amount of corporate generated content is likely to decrease in the coming decades. Not surprisingly, Millennials can absorb much more information at any single moment than previous generations. But this does NOT mean that they are absorbing information in the same way. To gain the attention and brand loyalty of Millennials, companies will have to turn to non-traditional, online information distribution platforms to create a new message that builds a sense of community and caring around their products.

    The best way to do that is to incorporate a cause or purpose into the reason for buying a product. It may be protecting the environment by going green, or reducing inequality in the world through acts of charity, or demonstrating a commitment to young people by investing in educational institutions, or all of the above. Regardless of the cause, not only did the era of unfettered capitalism end with this month’s financial meltdown, but so too did the days of appeals to consumers based solely on narrow self-interest or conspicuous consumption. Bling is out; doing good is in. Make that your message, and you have a story that will work effectively in the Millennial era.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics